[HN Gopher] Advanced Magnet Manufacturing Begins in the United S...
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Advanced Magnet Manufacturing Begins in the United States
Author : kungfudoi
Score : 172 points
Date : 2025-02-09 16:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| ck2 wrote:
| "rare earth metals" aren't "rare" to the USA
|
| They are "rare" per ton of earth in general
|
| So it's just that mining them is so labor intensive and so toxic
| (uranium and other radioactivity) that it is expensive outside of
| places like China.
|
| Automate that with bots or whatnot and maybe we don't have to
| invade Canada and Greenland and start WW3
| analog31 wrote:
| I think we could just regulate the industry properly and then
| find out what the actual cost is. It may have to be subsidized.
| With that said, I wouldn't want any new mining operations
| started in my state.
| XorNot wrote:
| I know you're being facetious but it's also worth spelling out
| somewhat explicitly as well: the US has never had a supply
| problem like that because through effective diplomacy and
| alliances it has commanded an excellent position to negotiate
| as a preferred trade partner through its world leading
| expertise in many areas and the export of its military spending
| as a security partner which up till very recently ensured
| alliances like NATO would prioritise these sorts of issues in
| its favour.
|
| The very recent turn of "we must literally own this territory"
| has been the surest possible way to create a crisis where none
| existed.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| My dad said there were a couple of countries that produced
| bauxite who thought they could be the OPEC of aluminum. And
| found out very quickly that bauxite isn't rare.
| perihelions wrote:
| The PRC is a near-monopoly on rare-earths production; the US
| is neither an ally nor security partner of China (to put it
| mildly). The US doesn't source these mineral from allies.
| lazide wrote:
| It used to, and used to have significant mines of it's own.
| foota wrote:
| Fun fact: rare earth metals are actually not the rarest metals
| per ton in the earth's crust, it's just that they only very
| rarely form into deposits in the form of minerals, and so
| they're very disperse.
| defrost wrote:
| From the PoV of Alchemists they rarely (ie. never for the
| most part) appear as unbound elements in nature.
|
| They are elements that require a _lot_ of chemical processing
| to seperate and isolate.
|
| The downside is that many of those processes generate a lot
| of toxic waste that requires (but often never receives) after
| treatment to neutralise.
|
| Hence reports of dams of low level radioactive waste and so
| forth associate with rare earth _processing_ (not so much
| _mining_ as the concentrates are often mined and then shipped
| elsewhere for processing).
|
| eg: https://www.benarnews.org/english/news/malaysian/rare-
| earths...
|
| has been an on again, off again relationship for a decade and
| a half now due to the waste piling up.
| s0rce wrote:
| I had some of element Tm in the lab the other day (not pure
| form), had to go look up the name as I had never come across
| it before.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I think the word 'rare' in rare earths here is merely implies
| expensive. That's why having cheap alternatives is such a big
| deal.
|
| Interesting to note that there is quite big movement towards
| rare earth free electrical motors in the last few years that
| rely only on cheap, readily available materials. Some expect
| that to grab up to 30% of the market in about a decade. Similar
| technology is also being used for creating wind generators that
| don't depend on these expensive/rare materials.
| jjk166 wrote:
| No, 'rare' in this case means dilute. They were named this
| back at a time when there were few uses for the substances
| and they were generally considered worthless.
| shireboy wrote:
| It is an attractive industry, but sometimes can be repulsive.
| sigpwned wrote:
| You don't have a monopoley on humor, you know.
| shireboy wrote:
| I know. I like to think my compass points my humor in the
| right direction, but maybe it got turned around.
| sQL_inject wrote:
| You're way outside your field buddy, stick to something else.
| shireboy wrote:
| I'd like to. The whole field is in flux and it's nearly
| impossible to find balance.
| chris_va wrote:
| While you are spinning around, just try to get your
| neighbors to align and things will snap into place.
| richk449 wrote:
| It seems amazing it has taken this long. Electric motors are so
| critical to national security, as well as the US economy.
|
| I keep wondering if these folks have a realistic alternative:
| https://www.nironmagnetics.com/ (They claim high performance rare
| earth free magnets.)
| adrian_b wrote:
| There have passed too many years since they have claimed that
| they know how to make iron nitride magnets, but no commercial
| products have appeared.
|
| The iron nitride magnets require a special crystal structure,
| which is not the most stable for that material, so it is
| difficult to find processing methods so that the material will
| have that crystal structure and even if the structure is
| produced, it might revert in time to a more stable structure,
| which does not have the desired magnetic properties.
|
| Like typical for such startups, that company does not say
| anything about which are the roadblocks that have prevented
| them for so many years to make iron nitride magnets until now,
| but it is pretty certain that their patents are bogus and the
| methods described there have not been usable for making what
| they claim to be able to make.
| pfdietz wrote:
| More interesting to me is Niron Magnetics, mentioned in the
| article, which is commercializing magnets based on a particular
| phase of iron nitride.
|
| https://www.nironmagnetics.com/
| adrian_b wrote:
| I doubt that they are commercializing anything.
|
| I see on their site now that they are building a plant that is
| expected to produce 5 (five) tons of magnets per year (compared
| to 1500 t/year for the plant discussed in the article or with
| 25000 t/year for the biggest of the around 300 Chinese plants).
|
| Such a small-scale production might be enough only to make
| samples to distribute to potential customers, to convince them
| to design products using such magnets.
|
| I will be pleasantly surprised when Niron Magnetics will be
| able to produce even those 5 tons of magnets.
|
| I have already forgotten how many years have passed since I
| have seen for the first time Niron Magnetics claiming that they
| will start soon the production of iron nitride magnets.
|
| Certainly there are more than 5 years since then, perhaps
| almost 10 years.
|
| Their first patents, in which they have claimed to know how to
| make iron nitride, have been issued 10 years ago. Their
| inability to actually produce such magnets demonstrate that at
| least the claims of the first patents were false.
|
| The language that is used in patent law is that patents "teach"
| how to do something that was unknown and non-obvious for those
| who were experts in prior art.
|
| I am pretty sure that the patents of Niron Magnetics do not
| teach anything, but they are the kind of patents filed by those
| who want to do something, but they have no idea how to do it,
| so they file bogus patents with overly broad and inaccurate
| claims, as a preventive strike used to block any competitors to
| introduce that kind of products, in order to gain for
| themselves time to actually discover how to make in reality
| what they want, in a very different way than described in their
| fictitious patents.
|
| If iron nitride magnets are indeed possible, then it is likely
| that Niron Magnetics has delayed by many years their use in
| practice, by being unable to develop such materials themselves,
| but simultaneously preventing others to do this.
| what-the-grump wrote:
| They just need to hoodwink an investor to give them enough
| money to buy a factory producing magnets in China. Then they
| are going to slowly back way from their claims of doing
| anything special.
|
| If they do not, they will run out of money and close after
| expending whatever capital they have.
|
| Rinse and repeat and brrr goes the money printer.
| ars wrote:
| Doesn't this shoot them in the foot? Once they get it working
| they have less time left on the patent.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| They could probably patent the way that actually works.
| Electric_Genie wrote:
| The problem with iron nitride is, and always has been, low
| coercivity. Niron hopes that GM can help them figure out a
| way to design a traction motor that has high performance even
| with low coercivity magnets. The fact that there are no such
| motors using iron-nitride magnets suggests that those efforts
| haven't succeeded yet. https://spectrum.ieee.org/permanent-
| magnet-motor
| pfdietz wrote:
| Good reply, thanks.
| pbmonster wrote:
| Any motor experts here? Why are they chasing rare earth metals in
| the first place? In the end, the mines are going to be in China
| anyway, right? Why don't we design around rare earth magnets in
| the first place?
|
| Synchronous reluctance motors where torque density isn't a strict
| requirement, and brushless separately excited synchronous motors
| (synchro motor with electromagnets on the rotor) for high
| torque/energy density applications?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Those kinds of motors are usable, but they have a lower energy
| efficiency than permanent-magnet motors, which causes a lower
| range for an electric vehicle.
|
| In all applications where it is possible to use motors without
| permanent magnets, that is usually done, because the motors
| without permanent magnets are normally cheaper.
| Zamiel_Snawley wrote:
| Electromagnets for the rotor cause significantly more heating,
| exactly where it is hardest cool, and where the heat is most
| likely to seep into the load.
|
| For high torque density applications, heat dissipation is often
| the limiting factor on duty cycle.
|
| Also, the slip rings capable of passing high current to an
| electromagnet rotor are expensive and less robust than
| permanent magnets.
|
| Essentially: it's possible but I haven't seen an application
| where it's practical.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > Also, the slip rings capable of passing high current to an
| electromagnet rotor are expensive and less robust than
| permanent magnets.
|
| The new designs are all inductively coupled, i.e. they have a
| rotating transformer coil built into the shaft. No brushes,
| no slip rings.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Coupling without using a core (or using an air core) is
| gonna hit efficiency pretty badly though.
| pbmonster wrote:
| Unfortunately, I can only find material from the
| marketing department on that issue. But if I understand
| correctly, both coils have a ferrite core (and yoke), but
| there is a small air gap where the rotating side is
| separated from the stationary side.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > the mines are going to be in China anyway, right
|
| If you had read the article you'd know they have their own
| mine: "Hardly any firms, even in China, do what MP is
| attempting: produce finished magnets starting with ore that the
| company mines itself" Mostly China doesn't mine materials but
| has concentrated the refining capacity in China for many
| commodities. Thankfully, we do have backup capacity so we won't
| be totally screwed if China cuts us off, and the refining
| technology is well understood and in a conflict we or our
| allies can cut them off from many raw materials so their
| refining advantage isn't a checkmate.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > Mostly China doesn't mine materials but has concentrated
| the refining capacity
|
| Unless I'm working on old information, this is not correct.
| The overwhelming majority of neodymium mining capacity is
| currently in China.
|
| > you'd know they have their own mine:
|
| Sure, but to make a difference from a geopolitical
| perspective, we need more than that. And I don't see those
| kind of mines being opened on a large scale anywhere in the
| west. Regulations are challenging and environmental
| resistance is significant.
| Animats wrote:
| MP Minerals got their magnet plant going. Good.
|
| MP Minerals operates the Mountain Pass, CA rare earths mine. This
| was the largest rare earths mine in the world at one time. After
| several shutdowns and two bankruptcies due to low rare earth
| prices, MP Minerals bought the mine in 2017 and had it producing
| ore in 2020. The mine already had a "beneficiation" plant, where
| raw ore goes in and a mix of rare earth elements, plus lots of
| unwanted tailings, come out. Unlike the plants in China, they
| have a process that doesn't require huge settlement ponds and
| vast amounts of water, so it doesn't create too much of a mess.
| It's mostly a mechanical process, and processes huge volumes of
| ore, yielding a much smaller volume of concentrate.
|
| What comes out of the benficiation plant needs more separation.
| That had to be sent to China to be refined, because there were no
| plants to do the separation in the US. So MP Minerals got the US
| Department of Defense to fund a separation plant at Mountain
| Pass. This separates the different rare earths. It's mostly a
| chemical process. Again, what comes out is a lot less volume than
| goes in. The Mountain Pass separation plant has been working for
| a few years now.
|
| What comes out of the separation plant needs more purification
| and alloying. That's what the new plant in Texas does. That's a
| modest sized facility in an industrial park. What comes out is
| metal ready to be formed into magnets. That completes the supply
| chain.
|
| Owning the whole supply chain insulates MP Minerals from trouble
| in the middle stages. Such as China's 2024 ban on export of rare
| earth processing technology.[1] Now that they have the whole
| supply chain working, they can increase production if desired.
| It's much easier to duplicate a plant than make a new one for a
| new process.
|
| [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-chinas-ban-rare-earths-
| pr...
| roenxi wrote:
| > After several shutdowns and two bankruptcies due to low rare
| earth prices...
|
| It's important to contextualise this, it is probably the most
| important part of the entire story. Rare earths aren't all that
| rare, they generally have a crustal abundance comparable to
| copper. The question of where rare earth mining & processing
| happens is mainly one of price. Or, accounting for second order
| effects, a question of environmental regulations.
| bombcar wrote:
| And bankruptcies due to price are a common occurrence in the
| mining industry.
|
| I've done consulting work at a giant open pit copper mine the
| size of which cannot be described, sitting idle waiting for
| the price of cooper to climb above a benchmark.
| corimaith wrote:
| Which is where tariffs come in to offset low price dumping.
| Inefficient, but it's better thought of as insurance
| premium on future geopolitical risk.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Or schemes similar to agriculture where the government
| buys excess production for price stability. Which is good
| for consumers and businesses alike.
| lesuorac wrote:
| To be clear, "price stability" in this case means a
| higher price compared to absence of government
| intervention.
|
| I'm all for a country subsidizing food to ensure
| sufficient domestic production but I am not for
| pretending it's good for a "price stability" reason.
|
| We are also well beyond sufficient domestic production.
| Our population has doubled in the past 50 years [1] while
| food production has tripled. We do not need agriculture
| subsides for sufficient domestic production.
|
| [1]: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-
| series/dec/popchange...
|
| [2]: https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/look-
| agricultural-...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I'm all for a country subsidizing food to ensure
| sufficient domestic production but I am not for
| pretending it's good for a "price stability" reason.
|
| Price stability itself is a valid goal. Yes, consumers
| may pay a liiiitle more for their eggs, milk or bread,
| but the price of the good can be relied upon which is
| very important for low-income households and their
| financial planning.
| vanattab wrote:
| you must not be buying eggs lately
| roenxi wrote:
| Are you absolutely sure that low prices wouldn't be more
| important to low income families? It seems like low
| prices-low income is a better match than slightly high
| prices-low income.
|
| My understanding of the situation was that low income
| shoppers are typically extremely keen for a bargain and
| are quite happy to shop around. And on paper they can
| just pretend the price is higher than it really is if
| stability matters that much to their planning.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Which is good for consumers and businesses alike.
|
| Only for domestic consumers. Foreign consumers? Not so
| much. A ton of the EU's excess butter and milk products
| for example ended up being donated to Africa and ruined
| local agriculture there that couldn't compete with free
| products.
|
| A similar story is playing out in Gaza where there hasn't
| ever been any incentive to build out domestic production
| of food because UNRWA brought in a loooot of food aid
| (which on top of that got looted and commercially re-sold
| by Hamas).
|
| Excess production is vital for any country, but it has to
| be kept at a moderate level and especially it must not be
| donated off in a way that threatens domestic production
| of the good in question.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Panama?
| Animats wrote:
| Right. See this story about the 2015 rare earths glut.[1]
| That glut triggered one of the shutdowns of Mountain Pass.
|
| Owning the whole supply chain is a win because the price of
| magnet-ready alloy fluctuates less than the price of dirt
| with some rare earths mixed in.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timtreadgold/2015/05/15/chin
| ese...
| modo_mario wrote:
| > So MP Minerals got the US Department of Defense to fund a
| separation plant at Mountain Pass.
|
| Are there any other contenders or did this come with any
| guarantees of this yet another example of oneside public-
| private partnerships?
| Animats wrote:
| There are other rare-earth deposits in the US, at least two
| in Wyoming and one in Arizona.[1] A different group claims to
| have a big find in Colorado. The Wyoming people claim to have
| found a deposit so big that if they built a large mine,
| they'd crash the rare earths market. Those are all in
| exploration stage, with no production.
|
| MP Minerals was mining ore and shipping beneficiated ore to
| China for further refining. So it made sense from a DoD
| national security perspective to fund on site refining in
| California. DoD only funded one of the four steps from mine
| to magnets.
|
| [1] https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/02/07/rare-earths-
| discover...
| ggm wrote:
| We're not looking for autarky, we're looking for strategic
| assurances and avoidance of dependency with adversarial
| consequences. It annoys me economic arguments delayed work to
| expand Australian rare earth sources, it would have been good not
| to get caught behind "cheaper is best" decision logic. The same
| logic shut down our microelectronics industry, local
| manufacturing, strategic policy in oil reserves and refining.
| Sure. Cheaper is great.. right up until it isn't because somebody
| else wants an outcome without price.
| throwaway422432 wrote:
| It's happening but slowly.
|
| Lynas Rare Earths who are the largest miner and processor
| outside of China are in the initial stages of building a plant
| in Texas (which includes funding from the DoD). They currently
| have plants in Kalgoorlie and Malaysia, but not end-to-end
| making magnets.
|
| Iluka have also secured the additional funding required for a
| processing plant in Australia and have deals with other miners
| for feed stock once they get going.
|
| Disclaimer: I own shares in the above two and others and all
| currently at a loss on my initial investments.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| So if I get in at your loss level, then I'll always be less
| down than you.
|
| "Less down" seems to be my preferred position.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Perhaps it was a bad idea to let it stop happening in the US[1]
| in the first place? I have acquaintances who told me about this
| more than a decade ago. We thought it was stupid to let the
| production lines go then... and obviously, we were right.
|
| [1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/07/the-saga-of-
| magneque...
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Its easy to throw around words like "stupid" on the internet,
| especially with hindsight, but how could it have been anything
| but a complex decision estimating values for many variables?
|
| Would they have been able to hit a competitive price while
| maintaining environmental regs and paying a domestic workforce,
| would china end up the only other supplier in the world? Can
| government subsidies be counted on to last multiple
| administrations?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Strong disagree, this was obvious if not from the very start,
| then as soon as the first company that relocated
| manufacturing started making ridiculous profits.
|
| Keeping the retail prices the same whilst more-than-
| decimating the manufacturing cost? How could it not be
| obvious that anyone and everyone would follow once there was
| a proof of concept.
|
| When capitalism is measured on incredibly short term
| performance, with no consideration of long term
| sustainability or national interest or maintenance of
| national skills and capabilities. This has been going on
| since well before the world wide web became accessible to
| most Western households.
|
| Nike started doing it in the 70s and they weren't the first.
|
| I've long been confused* to why there was no legislation to
| prevent "local" companies from giving away the keys to their
| kingdoms to foreign countries.
|
| *Not really, politicians are just as short-term motivated as
| business owners.
|
| It made sense. But the chickens are now coming home to roost,
| and they're shitting all over the place and the unprecedented
| profits have been spent on fancy plastic toys (that are now
| mostly landfill) instead of any kind of preparation for the
| inevitable tsunami of chicken shit.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > I've long been confused* to why there was no legislation
| to prevent "local" companies from giving away the keys to
| their kingdoms to foreign countries.
|
| >*Not really, politicians are just as short-term motivated
| as business owners.
|
| Voters also like lower prices today in exchange for higher
| volatility tomorrow. No one was forced to shop at national
| businesses rather than local businesses, but people like
| the lower prices of larger businesses.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| I was taught during grade school that capitalism drives
| lower prices, and since capitalism is good, it's alluded
| that paying less money for a product of similar value is
| almost a moral obligation. That company selling the "same
| thing" for more is obviously fleecing people and should
| go bankrupt.
|
| That model may have worked hundreds of years ago when
| comparing horseshoes made by local blacksmiths, and
| _possibly_ still held up when comparing mousetraps made
| in the same state / country. But it has issues when
| applied globally, and we have not adopted fast enough.
| lazide wrote:
| If you can pay $5 for something instead of $10, why
| wouldn't that be better for you?
| mindslight wrote:
| It's better for you individually-immediately, but on the
| larger scale the government policy is that average prices
| cannot go down. So then the government created enough new
| money to make the lower priced item cost $10. And due to
| kayfabe "fiscal responsibility", the government couldn't
| even spend that new money (representing shared surplus
| from tech/market progress) on useful things, and instead
| just dumped it into the housing bubble.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Which is why it should be legal to buy stolen goods!
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I 've long been confused to why there was no legislation
| to prevent "local" companies from giving away the keys to
| their kingdoms to foreign countries._
|
| For a long time this _seemed_ like an exceptionally good
| deal for the US.
|
| Other countries dig up their rare natural resources, send
| them to us, and in exchange we send them intangible
| products like Microsoft Office licenses? That's a great
| deal. You're literally getting something for nothing.
|
| Other countries' workers make refrigerators for us, sell
| them to us really cheaply, then they also send a load of
| the profits back to us because they licensed an American-
| owned design and brand? You cannot lose.
|
| Meanwhile, supposedly the skilled, high-added-value
| manufacturing would stay in the West with our educated
| workforce. And to top it all off, this was supposedly
| making the poor countries less poor _and_ more democratic
| as you can 't trade without free-flowing communication and
| a prosperous middle class.
|
| Of course in practice this has gone badly in the long term.
| The current generations are certainly feeling the
| consequences. But for the previous generations? They got
| the highest standard of living in the world!
| corimaith wrote:
| Well the idea was those manufacturing countries would
| also transition to consumption based economies, paving
| the way for the next generation of manufacturers to then
| rise up the value chain. Once everyone was rich then I
| guess we would start relying on automation.
|
| People forget that the flipside of keeping manufacturing
| in America is that it would have denied the ability for
| the global poor to rise up. And they should, they deserve
| that right too. What the neoliberals underestimated was
| the extent of how nationalistic these rising countries
| could become, as they instead not to transition but to
| instead keep on their low end manufacturing while
| simultaneously competing in the high end. Namely, it
| wasn't about improving the lives of their citizens, it
| was about achieving total control over the supply chain.
|
| The sad part of this situation is that for all the global
| south cheers the "decline of the west", with the closing
| of the American market and the utter dominance of China,
| the economic ladders up may have been forever broken.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _What the neoliberals underestimated was the extent of
| how nationalistic these rising countries could become_
|
| Yeah that was totally unprecedented.. If you ignore
| examples of exactly that happening at other times in
| history, like Japan. They went from a very poor feudal
| society where most people lived as peasants society to an
| industrial society able to seriously challenge America in
| less than a century. Violent rabid nationalism came with
| and facilitated that transition.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > Of course in practice this has gone badly in the long
| term. The current generations are certainly feeling the
| consequences.
|
| Has it though? Because I think preventing lower-skill
| industry from migrating to lower-wage countries would
| have been a MASSIVE intervention into market dynamics
| with extremely unclear outcome, and it is very easy to be
| dishonest about its price and possible consequences.
|
| An example: If we had wanted to prevent consumer
| electronics industry to shift abroad, we would have
| needed to massively intervene starting in the 1970s (!!).
| Products like radios, TVs, etc. would have been
| _significantly_ more expensive, and a lot of that
| generations talent that made Intel, NVidia, Microsoft
| etc. happen might have stayed in those sectors instead,
| thanks to cushy subsidies.
|
| Its quite possible that as a result, countries that did
| not waste so much effort on fighting market dynamics
| would have just pulled ahead. Comparing with a
| hypothetical timeline where there's a "healthy"
| (subsidised) US steel industry, lots of domestic
| electronics assembly and every other screen is "made in
| USA"-- BUT Microsoft is a European company instead, and
| Apple is Japanese-- that is a bad tradeoff in my view and
| entirely plausible.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Has it though?_
|
| Well, the hope that trade with China would lead to them
| becoming more democratic doesn't seem to have come
| through.
|
| And there was a hope the West would keep doing the design
| work, and high-tech manufacturing. There isn't much
| Silicon being produced in Silicon Valley these days.
|
| I'm not saying there's an alternative - I can't take a
| time machine back to the 1980s and explore a different
| timeline. I'm just saying that many of the _purported
| long-term_ benefits of globalisation haven 't really come
| about.
| blitzar wrote:
| > I've long been confused* to why there was no legislation
| to prevent "local" companies from giving away the keys to
| their kingdoms to foreign countries
|
| Sounds like you dont want freedom and capitalism anymore.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I don't think that this is an obvious decision at all, and it
| is very easy to be deceptive about upsides and gloss over the
| downsides of forcefully retaining domestic industry sectors:
|
| If you want to keep industries like this, you are basically
| arguing that taxpayers should subsidise them-- the jobs you
| retain are not a straightforward net gain, you pay for the wage
| difference in tax money (or price, where typically the consumer
| foots the bill, which is often just like a rather regressive
| tax).
|
| There are good arguments that this is simply necessary for
| absolutely vital industries like agriculture, which gets a
| generous ~$20 billion/year to stay local. But it is clear to me
| that this is not something that you can do for every industry--
| that would basically amount to a small-scale planned economy
| (with all its drawbacks), would be very likely to poach talent
| from sectors that are actually "more valuable" according to
| market consensus, and would also be likely to provoke
| retaliatory actions by international trading partners.
|
| For this specifically, I think throwing some hundreds of
| millions of taxdollars around to keep/reestablish the industry
| is probably a good deal, but it is rather obvious to me that
| you have to draw the line somewhere; spending hundreds of
| billions to maximize autarky would be a really bad idea even
| though it is easy to make it sound universally good ("local
| jobs! supply chain safety! trade balance!").
| lesuorac wrote:
| Pretty sure it's a very obvious decision.
|
| Fire your unionized US workforce. Replace them a cheaper non-
| unionized workforce. Sell the goods at the same price.
| Increase your current profit margin while protecting future
| profit margins from unions.
|
| Like half the reason why people do manufacturing in China is
| because all the manufacturing is there. If you had a problem
| with the item after it's been molded you can go to the molder
| and see what's going on. Then walk across the street to the
| plastic supplier to get them to adjust their output to fix
| your mold issues. That's not a Chinese specific thing, you
| can have this situation anywhere as long as the industries
| are co-located.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| If the American workers aren't paid better than the Chinese
| workers then why would they live in America instead of
| China? It won't be for the cheap housing and cheap
| healthcare...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Because movement between countries is not possible for
| the vast magority of the workforce. An americqn
| steelworker cannot just up stakes and move to
| canada/china/europe. Such things take many years and,
| unless you are allowed to renouce your citizenship, you
| will still be talking to the IRS every year.
| Aunche wrote:
| The US thought it was "stupid" to let shipbuilding jobs leave
| the US, leading to the Jones Act. This hurt just about every
| other domestic industry, consumers, and caused the American
| shipbuilding industry to deteriorate even more.
| dmoy wrote:
| That's fair, but it can be done in ways drastically different
| from the Jones Act. The Jones Act fails in large part because
| it is so indirect. If you instead e.g. buy surplus production
| (like say we do for farming today), it tends to not totally
| kill off the industry.
|
| If the Jones Act _had_ worked it would have looked genius
| because it didn 't require spending money by the government.
| It didn't work though.
| jburbank wrote:
| Has there ever been something like the Jones act, that has
| worked? In any western democracy? Honest question. I wonder
| if the nature of international commerce and large nation
| domestic policy is too complex and chaotic.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The US Army keeps the M1 Abrams line spun up despite a
| lack of losses to ensure that when losses _do_ happen, it
| can be replaced.
|
| So far the only effective method has been to purchase a
| fixed amount of the final desired product regardless of
| actual demand.
| maxwell wrote:
| Smoot-Hawley and the Buy American Act, which
| protected/enabled the Arsenal of Democracy to win the
| Second World War. Europe's Common Agricultural Policy.
| Voluntary Export Restraints. Steel and aluminum tariffs.
| Tech/IP restrictions from the U.S./EU on communist
| Chinese firms.
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| Smoot-Hawley was passed while America was a net exporter
| of industrial products and hurt American manufacturers. I
| don't see any way to skew it as having helped win WW2.
| dmoy wrote:
| Honestly dunno if anyone does anything similar to the
| Jones Act. Certainly not in shipping (though a lot of
| countries require domestic flagging, not built).
|
| Outside of shipping idk what the analogous situation
| would be
| nradov wrote:
| Retaining some amount of domestic shipbuilding and merchant
| marine capacity is a strategic necessity. This is an
| existential issue for the entire country. If that hurts other
| domestic industries then that is an acceptable consequence.
| But there are probably better ways to accomplish that than
| the Jones Act.
| seventytwo wrote:
| Great!
| Sporktacular wrote:
| This article just kind of assumes the reader should prefer US
| firms succeed in making these magnets over Chinese firms. I'm not
| sure why I should prefer that if China do it cheaper and better.
| Some nationalistic readers or those concerned about US national
| security and supply chains might care. Or maybe the US should
| just maintain better trade relations, and vote to do so.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| It's definitely rewriting of history / priorities based on the
| current political climate.
|
| 30 years ago the opposite was celebrated as the saviour of
| American capitalism (by short term thinking people who are
| probably billionaires now, and therefore, as individuals,
| insulated against any of the '30 years later' repercussions).
|
| The US is going to need to naturalise all of its illegal
| immigrants to have a chance at ramping up local manufacturing.
| gkanai wrote:
| Time and time again we see the US moving production of some key
| product or material overseas only to regret that decision a
| number of years later. It happens over and over again.
|
| Market forces are great, but should be ignored in key sectors
| that are important for national security. That goes for rare
| earth minerals or shipbuilding or key supplies for munitions or
| PPE that we needed during the pandemic, (etc.)
| yardie wrote:
| The free market will always chose to go to the places for the
| cheapest material and labor. There is no strategy to it. But,
| there are some industries the US have placed strategic value on
| and will subsidize no matter the cost.
|
| - USPS - literally written into the Constitution
|
| - Passenger rail - Amtrak keeps pudding along even though
| financially it doesn't make sense.
|
| - Merchant marines - cargo is cheap. And cheaper in flag
| countries with lax labor rules. Yet, we maintain a expensive
| flotilla.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I wonder if the US does or would subsidize USPS. USPS is
| required to earn enough money to pay for itself, which it
| mostly does by delivering advertising to people's mailboxes.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The USPS isn't subsidized with money, but it has a lot of
| special treatment legally. Things like "the inside of your
| mailbox becomes federal property" and the office of the
| postmaster general come to mind.
|
| Other than that, as you said, the USPS is supposed to earn
| enough to pay for itself, which means that mail in cities
| tends to subsidize rural services.
| solatic wrote:
| You cannot simply "ignore" market forces (you might as well
| propose to ignore the laws of gravity, it's basically the same,
| consumers will "gravitate" to the products they find most
| attractive). In a free market, the same product (produced
| abroad) is cheaper. Without restrictions, domestic consumers
| will buy the foreign product and drive the inefficient domestic
| producer out of business.
|
| National security considerations can _adapt_ to market forces
| by either directly subsidizing the domestic product (so that it
| will be as cheap as the foreign product) or establishing
| tariffs on the foreign product (so that it will be at least as
| expensive as the domestic product) or by outright banning the
| import of the foreign product (so that only the domestic
| product competes in the domestic market).
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >You cannot simply "ignore" market forces
|
| Market forces aren't real. They are artificial arbitrary
| rules agreed upon by a majority of participants in a
| financial system.
|
| They are not natural laws like Newton's law of universal
| gravitation and the fact that even one person thinks they are
| is the greatest scam ever pulled on humanity.
|
| Humanity will never be free until it rids itself of
| economists and MBAs.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| They're as real as any other aspect of human nature. There
| are no "artificial rules", just humans acting according to
| normal human behavior. Ignore that at your peril.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >There are no "artificial rules", just humans acting
| according to normal human behavior.
|
| There are uncountably many examples of humans, presumably
| normal, existing outside of the rules set by free market
| capitalism and not collapsing into a black hole.
|
| One such example is the Indigenous peoples of Australia,
| who lived for tens of thousands more years than the
| concept of free market capitalism has existed, without
| even the concept of money or property beyond what one
| carried on their person.
|
| I have to assume that they are "normal" humans.
|
| Even today many aboriginals struggle with "tHe NaTuRaL
| LaWz of tEh MaRkEt JuSt LiKe GrAvItY BrAh TrUsT Me
| BrAHHHHH" because they've only been exposed to them for
| less than 0.3% of their culture's total existence.
|
| There are examples, today, right now, this very minute,
| in (extremely northern) Europe of presumably normal
| humans who look at the rules you consider to be "natural"
| with shock and horror.
|
| A cult has convinced you that their ideology is natural
| law. You can both participate in this system and realize
| that it is all bullshit and not be a hypocrite.
| throwintp wrote:
| Thanks to Bill Clinton America can celebrate one or two
| manufacturing plants it gets..
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Wait, those strong neodymium magnets are only produced in China?!
| doctorplop wrote:
| There is a European producer, the German/Finnish VAC Group. But
| they also get their raw materials from China (I think).
|
| Neodymium magnets are fascinating: they have enabled much
| smaller and more efficient elevator engines, used as undulators
| in synchroton x-ray sources, and many other places.
| physicsguy wrote:
| This was a key thing that was talked about when I was doing my
| doctorate in this area. There has been a lot of research in
| magnet manufacturing without the difficult to source metals
| coming from abroad.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > but rather in a unique process based on recycling the materials
| from discarded magnets.
|
| Aka buying magnets from China, crushing them, then reforming them
| into "American made" magnets.
|
| We've been doing the same with steel for over a decade now. It's
| a good way around tariffs and origin laws.
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